Drummond Biles
Mechanical Engineering PhD Candidate | University of New Hampshire
Outreach
New England Chimney Sweep Festival 2017
In northern NH members of the UNH community went to help put on a STEMfest for grade school students. My activity that I brought was the design of a wind turbine. Students used the setup pictured below and shape wind turbine blades to spin an electric motor. Students learned about how wind pushes the turbine through blade shape, number of blades, and blade angle.
North Country Stemfest
While at UNH I have gotten involved with a number of outreach activities geared toward middle through high-school students. I participate in the STEMbassadors program created by the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at UNH. Through this program and other opportunities that have arisen I have traveled around the state of NH getting students and the community engaged. The STEMbassador program works on a volunteer basis and get college students from all science and engineering disciplines into grade school classroom to run STEM activities. I along with two other graduate student utilized this program to create and run an activity around fluid dynamics to get students excited about the field we work in.
The above left picture shows the 14 setups which I brought up the the STEMfest. The right picture shows a completed kit setup in vertical axis turbine mode. The kit could be used for either traditional horizontal axis turbines or vertical axis. I built these setups along with a construction guide and activity sheet for the teacher who attended the event. Each one of the kits were handed out to teachers after the activity so that they could then go and run them at their school. Throughout all of our outreach we have tried to think of ways to make the largest impact with the students and schools we work with.
In 2015 I joined a startup program called STembassadors with the goal of getting grade school students excited about science and exposing students to my field of study. I worked with two other graduate students developing an activity where we taught students about buoyancy. We had the students build tinfoil boats and attempt to store as many pennies as possible in the boat before it sank. We then discussed boat design and performed a demonstration showing how the weight of water which the boat could displace was connected to its holding capacity and overall design. Students then got to remake their boats and see how they could improve on their design.
Pictured left is a group of students that we worked with at a local YMCA. Their boat designs are on the table, with first designs on the right and second designs on the left.
In the summer of 2017 I was asked to attend the annual conference of the Northeast Association of Chimney & Hearth Professionals and give a seminar on the fundamentals of heat transfer. I presented on the three modes of heat transfer and how knowledge of the physics behind each mode applies to home heating/cooling. I also gave two demonstrations, one on how surface properties change the radiative behavior of a material using a thermal imaging camera and one demonstrated on visualizing natural convection (pictured below).